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TRIC Interview Uncut
TRIC Interview Uncut
TF: You introduced the term “spiritual bypassing” 30 years ago now. For those who are unfamiliar
with the concept, could you define and explain what it is?
in the Buddhist community I was in, and also in myself. Although most of us
use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional
the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made
peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss
path, in that spirituality does involve a vision of going beyond our current
karmic situation.
buddha and the human within us. And it leads to a conceptual, one-sided kind of
spirituality where one pole of life is elevated at the expense of its opposite:
Absolute truth is favored over relative truth, the impersonal over the personal,
one’s need for love, but this only drives the need underground, so that it often
becomes unconsciously acted out in covert and possibly harmful ways instead.
TF: Might this account for some of the messiness in our sangha communities?
JW: Definitely. It is easy to use the truth of emptiness in this one-sided way: “Thoughts
and feelings are empty, a mere play of samsaric appearances, so pay them no heed. See
their nature as emptiness, and simply cut through them on the spot.” In the realm of
practice, this could be helpful advice. But in life situations these same words could also
be used to suppress or deny feelings or concerns that need our attention. I’ve seen this
TF: What interests you most about spiritual bypassing these days?
JW: I’m interested in how it plays out in relationships, where spiritual bypassing often
wreaks its worst havoc. If you were a yogi in a cave doing years of solo retreat, your
psychological wounding might not show up so much because your focus would be
entirely on your practice, in an environment that may not aggravate your relational
wounds. It’s in relationships that our unresolved psychological issues tend to show up
most intensely. That’s because psychological wounds are always relational — they form in
The basic human wound, which is prevalent in the modern world, forms around not
and traumatic for a child’s developing and highly sensitive nervous system. And as we
internalize how we were parented, our capacity to value ourselves, which is also the basis
for valuing others, becomes damaged. I call this a “relational wound“ or the “wound of
the heart.”
JW: There is a whole body of study and research in Western psychology showing how
close bonding and loving attunement— what is known as “secure attachment” — have
function effectively in the world: how our brains form, how well our endocrine and
immune systems function, how we handle emotions, how subject we are to depression,
how our nervous system functions and handles stress, and how we relate to others.
lack of basic trust, and a deep sense of inner deficiency. So most of us suffer from an
extreme degree of alienation and disconnection that was unknown in earlier times—
from society, community, family, older generations, nature, religion, tradition, our
TF: And how is this relevant for how we practice the dharma?
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JW: Many of us— and I include myself here— originally turn to the dharma, at least in
part, as a way of trying to overcome the pain of our psychological and relational
wounding. Yet we are often in denial or unconscious about the nature or extent of this
wounding. We only know that something isn’t right and we want to be free from
suffering.
TF: We may turn towards the dharma from a wounded place that we're not even aware of?
JW: Yes. We turn to the dharma to feel better, but then may unwittingly wind up using
TF: So how does our psychological wounding affect our spiritual practice?
JW: Being a good spiritual practitioner can become what I call a compensatory identity
that covers up and defends against an underlying deficient identity, where we feel badly
about ourselves, not good enough, or basically lacking. Then, although we may be
practicing diligently, our spiritual practice can be used in the service of denial and
defense. And when spiritual practice is used to bypass our real-life human issues, it
TF: Can you give some more examples of how this shows up in Western practitioners?
JW: In my psychotherapy practice I often work with dharma students who have
engaged in spiritual practice for decades. I respect how their practice has been beneficial
for them. Yet despite the sincerity as practitioners, their practice is not fully penetrating
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their life. They seek out psychological work because they remain wounded and not
fully developed on the emotional/relational/personal level, and they may be acting out
It’s not uncommon to speak beautifully about the basic goodness or innate perfection of
our true nature, but then have difficulty trusting it when one’s psychological wounds
are triggered. Often dharma students who have developed some kindness and
compassion for others are hard on themselves for falling short of their spiritual ideals,
and, as a result, their spiritual practice becomes dry and solemn. Or being of benefit to
others turns into a duty, or a way of trying to feel good about themselves. Others may
unconsciously use their spiritual brilliance to feed their narcissistic inflation and
People with depressive tendencies who may have grown up with a lack of loving
may use teachings on non-self to reinforce their sense of deflation. Not only do
they feel bad about themselves, but they regard their insecurity about this as a
further fault—a form of me-fixation, the very antithesis of the dharma— which
further fuels their shame or guilt. Thus they become caught in a painful struggle
The sangha often becomes an arena where people play out their unresolved family
issues. It’s easy to project onto teachers or gurus, seeing them as parental figures, and
then trying to win their love or else rebelling against them. Sibling rivalry and
competition with other sangha members over who is the teacher’s favorite is also
common.
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Meditation is also frequently used to avoid uncomfortable feelings and unresolved life
situations. For those in denial about their personal feelings or wounds, meditation
distance. They are at a loss when it comes to relating directly to their feelings or to
I’ve often seen how attempts to be nonattached are used in the service of sealing people
off from their human and emotional vulnerabilities. In effect, identifying oneself as a
engagement with others that might stir up old wounds and longings for love. It’s
painful to see someone maintaining a stance of detachment when underneath they are
TF: So, how do we reconcile the ideal of nonattachment with the need for human attachment?
JW: That’s a good question. If Buddhism is to fully take root in the Western psyche, in
my view, it needs to become more savvy about the dynamics of the Western psyche,
which is rather different from the Asian psyche. We need a larger perspective that can
recognize and include two different tracks of human development— which we might
call growing up and waking up, healing and awakening, or becoming a genuine human
person and going beyond the person altogether. We are not just humans learning to
become buddhas, but also buddhas waking up in human form, learning to become fully
human. And these two tracks of development can mutually enrich each other.
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While the fruition of dharma practice is awakening, the fruition of becoming a fully
developed person is the capacity to engage in I-Thou relatedness with others. This
means risking being fully open and transparent with others, while appreciating and
taking an interest in what they are experiencing and how they are different from
oneself. This capacity for open expressiveness and deep attunement is very rare in this
In short, dharma is all too often used as a way to deny our human side. As one Western
Zen teacher profiled in The New York Times told of being advised by one of his teachers:
“What you need to do is put aside all human feelings.” When entering psychotherapy
decades later, he recognized this had not been helpful advice, and it had taken him
But if we hold a perspective that includes the two developmental tracks, then we will
not use absolute truth to belittle relative truth. Instead of the either/or logic of, “Your
feelings are empty, so just let them go,” we could take a both/and approach: “Feelings
are empty, and sometimes we need to pay close attention to them.” In light of absolute
truth, personal needs are insubstantial like a mirage, and fixating on them causes
suffering. Yes, and at the same time, if a relative need arises, just shunting it aside can
cause further problems. In terms of relative truth, being clear about where you stand
and what you need is one of the most important principles of healthy communication in
relationships.
The great paradox of being both human and buddha is that we are both dependent and
food and clothing to love, connectedness, and inspiration and help with our
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development. Though our buddha nature is not dependent— that's absolute truth— our
Of course, in the largest sense, absolute and relative are completely interwoven and
cannot be kept apart: The more we realize the absolute openness of what we are, the
more deeply we come to recognize our relative interconnectedness with all beings.
JW: Yes. Nonattachment is a teaching about our ultimate nature. Our buddha
the negative meaning of clinging. Being free and open, our buddha nature has no
need to cling.
Yet to grow into a healthy human being, we need a base of secure attachment in the
positive, psychological sense, meaning: close emotional ties to other people that
naturalist wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it is bound
fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.”
Similarly, the hand cannot function unless it is attached to the arm—that’s attachment
everything in the universe. On the human level we can’t help feeling somewhat
Thus it’s natural to grieve deeply when we lose someone we’re close to. When Chogyam
Trungpa Rinpoche attended the memorial service for his dear friend and colleague
Suzuki Roshi, he let out a piercing cry and wept openly. He was acknowledging his
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close ties to Suzuki Roshi, and it was beautiful that he could let his feeling show like
that.
Since we cannot avoid some kind of attachment to others, the question becomes, “Are
terms is insecure attachment, for it leads either to fear of close personal contact or else to
obsession with it. Interestingly, people growing up with secure attachment are more
trusting, which makes them much less likely to cling to others. Maybe we could call that
“nonattached attachment.”
I’m afraid that what many Western Buddhists are practicing in the relational area is not
freedom from attachment. It’s still a form of clinging— clinging to the denial of your
not need anything from others. That’s their adaptive strategy, and it’s an
intelligent and useful one. Obviously if your needs aren’t going to be met, it’s too
painful to keep feeling them. It’s better to turn away from them and develop a
TF: So there’s a tendency to use Buddhist ideas to justify dismissing the natural
JW: Yes. Many of us who are drawn to Buddhism are avoidant attachment types
in the first place. When we hear teachings on nonattachment it’s like: “Oh that
sounds familiar. I feel really at home here.” In this way a valid dharma teaching
But I want to be clear that I’m not trying to pathologize anyone. All of this is just
something to understand with kindness and compassion. It’s one of the ways we
try to cope with the wound of the heart. Not needing anyone allows one to
survive and manage in an emotional desert. But later on, in adulthood, the
avoidant attachment type has a hard time developing deep ties with others, and
this can lead to a deep feeling of isolation and alienation, which is a very painful
state.
TF: What happens in a sangha community if the majority of people have an avoidant
JW: Avoidant types tend to be dismissive of other people’s needs because, guess
JW: What happens is that people feel justified in not respecting each other’s
feelings and needs. Not surprisingly, “need” becomes a dirty word in many
spiritual communities.
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TF: And people don’t feel free to say what they want.
JW: Right. You don't say what you want because you don’t want to be seen as
needy. You’re trying to be nonattached. But that is like an unripe fruit trying to
detach itself prematurely from the branch and hurl itself to the ground instead of
gradually ripening to the point where it’s naturally ready to let go.
naturally ready to let go of clinging to self, just as a ripe fruit naturally lets go of
the branch and falls to the ground. Our dharma practices of wisdom and
compassion definitely help with this ripening. But if we’re using our practice to
avoid our feeling life, this will definitely stunt the ripening process, rather than
support it.
TF: Becoming a full human being. Is that what you mean by “becoming ripe”?
JW: Yes, becoming a genuine human being through working honestly with
emotional, psychological, and relational issues that prevent us from being fully
If there’s a large gap between our practice and our human side, we remain
unripe. Our practice may ripen, but our life doesn’t. And there’s a certain point
TF: So you’re saying that spiritual bypassing not only corrupts our dharma practice, it
JW: Yes. One way it blocks ripening is through making spiritual teachings into
prescriptions about what you should do, how you should think, how you should
speak, how you should feel. Then our spiritual practice becomes taken over by
what I call “the spiritual superego”— the voice that whispers “shoulds” in our
ear. This is a big obstacle to ripening, because it feeds our sense of deficiency.
One Indian teacher, Swami Prajnanpad, whose work I admire, said that
authentically where you are can become a form of inner violence if it splits you in
two and pits one side against the other. When we use spiritual practice to “be
JW: Yes. And if the ethos of a spiritual organization leads to dismissing your
feelings or relational needs, this can lead to big communication problems, to say
the very least. It’s also not a great setup for a marriage if one or both partners is
expressing and listening to feelings and needs forms the basis for a nonviolent
intelligence. It’s the body’s direct, holistic, intuitive way of knowing and
factors all at once, unlike our conceptual mind, which can only process one thing
feeling often helps you contact deep inner truths. Unfortunately, traditional
Buddhism doesn’t make a clear distinction between feeling and emotion, so they
TF: There’s a de-emphasis on taking feeling seriously on some level, Like not exploring
what goes on inside us when we become triggered by our partners, for example.
JW: Yes. The truth is, most of us don't get as triggered anywhere in our lives as
And beyond compassion we also need to develop attunement: the ability to see
and feel what another person is going through— what we could call “accurate
possible if we can first of all be attuned to ourselves and track what we are going
through.
TF: What kinds of tools or methods have you found effective for working with difficult
experience, even the worst samsaric things, has its own intelligence. If we meet
our experience fully and directly, we can begin to uncover that intelligence and
For example, if we go deeply into the experience of ego inflation, we may find a
more genuine impulse at its core—that it’s a wounded way of trying to proclaim
our goodness, to remind ourselves and affirm that we are basically good.
Similarly, at the heart of all the darkest human feelings and experiences there is a
seed of intelligence which, when revealed, can point in the direction of freedom.
JW: I help people inquire deeply into their felt experience and let it gradually
reveal itself and unfold, step by step. I call this “tracking and unpacking”: You
track the process of present experiencing, following it closely and seeing where it
leads. And you unpack the beliefs, identities, and feelings that are subconscious
experience in this way, it’s like unraveling a tangled ball of yarn: different knots
As a result, we find that we’re able to be present in places where we’ve been
ourselves that need our help, we develop an intimate, grounded kind of inner
attunement with ourselves, which can help us more easily relate to others where
I’ve found that when people engage in both psychological and meditative
practice, the two can complement each other in mutually beneficial, synergistic
ways. Together they provide a journey that includes both healing and
awakening. Sometimes one way of working is more appropriate for dealing with
I take some encouragement in this approach from the words of the 17th Gyalwang
Karmapa, who has made a point of saying that we need to draw on any teaching
engage in methods that are appropriate just because they do not conform to
Buddhist philosophy, you are actually being derelict in your bodhisattva duty.
JW: Yes. The word “com-passion” literally means “feeling with.” You can’t have
compassion unless you’re first willing to feel what you feel. This opens up a
certain rawness and tenderness— what Trungpa Rinpoche spoke of as the “soft
JW: Yes. That’s the sign that you’re getting close to bodhicitta. That rawness is
also quite humbling. Even if we’ve been doing spiritual practice for decades, we
still find these big, raw, messy feelings coming up --- maybe a deep reservoir of
ourselves nakedly to them, we’re moving toward greater openness, in a way that
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JW: That question always comes up. Wallowing in feelings is being stuck in
fixation fed by going over and over stories in your mind. Unconditional
JW: For example, if the feeling is sadness, wallowing might involve fixating on a
story like “poor me,” rather than directly relating to the actual sadness itself,
So delving into feelings might sound like indulgence, but I would say that the
Rinpoche taught that fearlessness is the willingness to meet and feel your fear.
We could expand that to say fearlessness is the willingness to meet, face, include,
make room for, welcome, allow, open to, surrender to whatever we’re
experiencing. It’s actually quite brave to acknowledge, feel, and open to your
need for healthy attachment and connectedness, for example, especially if you’re
relationally wounded. Indulgence, on the other hand, means fixating on the need
JW: Yes, the relative freedom of, “ I’m willing to feel whatever I’m feeling. I’m
felt experience.
openness— into our life. With spiritual bypassing, emptiness doesn’t become
integrated with our feeling life. It can turn into a personal dryness where we
TF: What would help our sangha communities develop in more emotionally honest
ways?
JW: We need to work on relationships. Otherwise our relational wounds are all
For instance, if I’m not able to own my own needs, then I will tend to dismiss
others’ needs and see them as a threat because their neediness subconsciously
reminds me of my own denied needs. And I will judge others and use some kind
JW: In conjunction with their spiritual practice. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to
Western dharma communities to help people work with their personal material.
JW: We could start by recognizing the fact that spiritual communities are subject
to the same group dynamics that every group is. The hard truth is that spiritual
practice often does not heal deep wounding in the area of love, or translate into
I see relationship as the leading edge of human evolution at this time in history.
haven’t brought that illumination very fully into the area of interpersonal
sangha.
JW: Being aware that we inevitably project our unconscious material on other
group members would be a good start. We also need to learn how to speak with
each other personally and honestly, from our present experience instead of
needs to be what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “deep listening,” based on learning to
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spiritual work.
JW: Yes. We also need to develop a tremendous tolerance and appreciation for
and one-upmanship.
While we all venerate the dharma, we will all have different ways of embodying
TF: One last question about attachment in relationships: Are you saying that to be truly
healing for avoidant types would involve becoming willing and able to feel their
need for human connectedness, instead of spiritually bypassing it. Once that
The late Dzogchen master Chagdud Tulku made a powerful statement about the
me do Lamas have attachments? I don’t know how other Lamas might answer
this, but I must say yes. I recognize that my students, my family, my country
have no inherent reality... [Here he’s speaking absolute truth.} Yet, I remain
deeply attached to them. [Here he’s speaking relative truth.] I recognize that my
attachment has no inherent reality. [absolute truth]. Yet I cannot deny the
experience of it” [relative truth]. And he ends by saying, “Still, knowing the
approach. It joins absolute and relative truth while situating it all in the largest